In Susan Sontag’s now-classic essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag argues for a critical dimension of the term “camp.” Camp, for Sontag, is “one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.” For her, Camp emphasizes a blend of the silly and the extravagant, making the serious and the ridiculous equal to one another. She cites the beginnings of the Enlightenment period as an important moment for the establishment of this sensibility:

In Samuel Beckett’s canon, water is a recurring image. In his radio play, Embers, the protagonist Henry tells us that he is sitting by the ocean, in his stage play Endgame Nagg and Nell remember nearly drowning in Lake Como, and in his tour de force stage and later television play, Not I Mouth refers to the narrative gushing from her mouth as a “steady stream.” Water in these and other works by the Nobel Prize winning author is both a location and a metaphor; it is aligned with happy memories and danger, with transition and stasis, with the beginning and the end.

In the year of the 500th anniversary of the publication of Luther’s theses, the Shakespeare- Seminar 2017 calls for papers that address ideas of reform and reformation in Shakespeare's works. We invite papers on the literary and cultural repercussions of the two major early modern reformations – the one prompted by Martin Luther and the one initiated by Henry VIII. Taking our cue from Hamlet's famous charge to the players to “reform it altogether” (Hamlet 3.2.36), the seminar seeks to address both questions of religious reformation and of more widely conceived notions of personal, political, cultural, or literary reform in Shakespeare's poems and plays. Topics may include, but are not restricted to the reform/reformation of